Rob's Posterous
Programmer, web designer, and all round music enthusiast from Upstate, New York. I've been working in the web programming and design industry since 2004.
Programmer, web designer, and all round music enthusiast from Upstate, New York. I've been working in the web programming and design industry since 2004.
Lifehacker recently made a poll on the top 5 best personal web hosting services; and I was fairly upset by the results. In the end it looks like the people who commented on the original post used to pick the options, decided on the cheapest services. At the start of the article the author states that two of the big reasons for choosing an external host is for privacy and control. This makes perfect sense to me, but I would also like to throw a third guideline out there, speed. Sites like Posterous and Tumblr can have a pretty high latency during certain hours of the day, since you are sharing the host with numerous other people.
If you are looking to get the speed, control and security that other blog hosting services do not offer, I would recommend a VPS or Virtual Private Server. With this comes guaranteed memory and CPU cycles, as well as full root access. You can't ask for much more. With root access you can leave your server wide open for hackers or lock it down until nothing is running but apache on port 80; I wouldn't recommend this because, if apache needs to be restarted you will need to ssh into the host to restart the service. :D Control also goes hand in hand with root access, allowing you to change anything you want on the host. A lot of VPS providers now also allow you to swap OSs on the fly. For example I use Media Temple and I bought my new (ve) server with Debian installed as the operating system; it took approximately 10 minutes through their web portal to load up a fresh copy Ubuntu 9.10. Very, very, cool I thought. Finally, you can optimize apache to work the way you want it to, enabling and disabling modules and or settings allowing you to shed precious milliseconds off your load times.
Now that I have told you about the benefits of VPS over shared hosting I thought I would describe some of the negatives. For one they are usually more expensive; this is due to the fact that they are guaranteeing you processing power and memory. When you are one a shared host and you are not using any memory or processing power it gets distributed to the rest of the users. Another disadvantage is that you need to have some sort of Linux experience, since almost everything is done at the command line. In fact, after I locked down my system there is only one user enabled that can ssh into my host. So that means no FTP, web portal, etc, just command line. In conclusion, if you want true control, speed and security for your blog, website, or web application pick up a VPS over a shared host. Below, are my favorite hosts and why I chose them.
I've never used dreamhost's private server so I can't really comment on it, but I have used their shared hosting and it was as good as it gets for a shared service. So if you are looking for another cheap alternative to Media Temple or Linode, then I would recommend checking them out.
If you would like to read and or vote in the poll at lifehacker here is the link:
New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.
Steve Jobs
April, 2010
Steve Jobs on Flash not being supported by its iTouch, iPhone, and iPad devices.
